Not a day goes by that the average American doesn’t think about weight. We cut calories. We cut fat. We cut carbs. We eat five times a day. We eat three times a day. We join the gym. We take the stairs. We try to change our lives. Yet the weight epidemic continues to grow. So what’s going wrong?

In FULL, the first book to offer an insider perspective on weight loss, celebrated bariatric surgeon Michael Snyder teaches you to reject the diet mentality that thrives on restrictions, deprivations, and total reversals of lifestyle. Using the science of fullness and introducing a new definition of “healthy,” he brings us weight-control strategies that are rooted in our physiology and proves that the narcotic effect of fullness is the ultimate weapon in the battle for weight loss. Snyder provides us with industry-insider tips, tools, and information that have helped countless patients succeed in their weight-loss efforts. In FULL, you will learn how to:

• Choose from a variety of practical strategies to achieve sustainable weight loss regardless of dietary habits and preferences.

• End the confusion over portion control by synching visual and physiological cues of fullness.

• Be full with less food but equally as satisfied (if not more so!).

• Apply a Cheat Prescription so you can still say yes to indulgences and temptations without feeling like a failure.

• Take advantage of the five intentional steps of digestion to gain effortless control of your dietary behavior.

• Find fulfillment in a physical activity that is inexpensive, easy, and convenient.

With these new strategies and definitions, you will move from persistent dieting to living true to yourself and from being unhappily overweight to being a healthy individual who knows a happy weight better than a scale does. Dr. Snyder knows that it’s not the surgery that creates success in his patients; it’s what they do afterward that counts. And it is from this rich body of experience and practical wisdom that he’s created these strategies to help you effortlessly lose 10, 20, 30, 50 pounds—or more!

Excerpt:

The Full Effect

Just as each of us is hard wired to feel hungry, every one of us is hard wired to feel full. Our innate circuitry for fullness has been encoded in human genes for millions of years, for longer than we’ve had drive-thru restaurants, farmers markets, or the ability to mass- produce food. In fact, the precise biology of this fascinating process involves an effect similar to that in the use of narcotics. But before I get to the details that also compare it to narcotics, let me first describe the process with the help of a car analogy.

Overall, the basic physical journey toward fullness is similar to how a car’s fuel system works. When you go to the gas station, you’re starting a simple feedback loop. As you fill your car’s gas tank, the fuel gauge on the dashboard indicates the tank’s level of fullness with the help of a sensor. At some point, the indicator on your dashboard says F for Full. This prevents you from overfilling the tank and spilling fuel. Now picture your stomach as a tank and your brain as the dashboard fuel gauge—and a very primitive one at that.

We tend to think about keeping our stomachs happy, but we should really be focusing on our brains—our ancient, reptilian brains—because that’s where true fullness resides. Contrary to what seems logical, you are not full when your stomach is full; technically, you are full when your primitive brain believes that your stomach is full and tells you that you’re full. The obvious next question becomes: how do you get your brain to believe you are full? Of course, it’s important to understand the general relationship between your brain and the rest of your body. This is true about everything we experience in our physical lives. When you step on a tack (pin side up), for instance, it’s not your foot that actually hurts; it’s your brain deciding that the impulses from your foot indicate “hurt.” People cannot feel this pain if they have nerve or spinal injuries that prevent signals from traveling from foot to brain. They will still injure their foot, but they won’t experience the physical pain like the rest of us do. In the case of fullness, that undeniable “full” sensation is felt after your brain—and, more specifically, your hypothalamus—has interpreted all the signals coming in that originate in your stomach, the anatomical organ between your esophagus and small intestine where the real magic begins on both a physical and hormonal level.

If we could cast back to millions of years ago and visit our ancestral cavemen and women, we’d find that the hypothalamus functions exactly the same now as it did then. This is where your inner reptile lives and makes certain demands of you. An exceedingly ancient structure that sits in the middle of your head, the hypothalamus is unlike most other (more sophisticated and advanced) brain regions, and has maintained a striking similarity in structure throughout the course of human evolution. We’d even find remarkable similarities in the hypothalamus of animals that came long before mammals roamed the earth.

Evolving around the time of the dinosaurs, this part of the brain serves an important purpose: to beat starvation. In the absence of food, the hypothalamus is responsible for releasing biological chemicals that change how the body functions so it can successfully (and hopefully) find food to survive. For example, when faced with real starvation, the hypothalamus will trigger the secretion of a hormone called orexia, which, in tiny doses, can have an overwhelming and profound effect. It will make you acutely more alert, increase your muscle efficiency, and heighten problem solving—all in the name of finding food quickly or risk death.

The hypothalamus does more than simply control hunger and serve as your psychological eating center. It helps to think of it as the health maintenance organization of your entire body, a kind of headquarters for maintaining the body’s preferred status quo, sometimes referred to its homeostasis or “balance.” It houses several important centers that preside over a wide range of physiological functions, including body temperature, thirst, water balance, circadian rhythms (for example, sleep-wake cycles), fatigue, escape from danger, contractions during childbirth, and even arousal and sexual function. We owe our experiences of pleasure, aggression, stress, embarrassment, and aversion to our hypothalamus. It’s fully functional at birth, and one of its most important jobs is to link the nervous system to the hormonal system.

This is possible through the help of the pituitary gland, a pea-sized structure that dangles off the bottom of the hypothalamus and which actually secretes those behavior-altering hormones as dictated by the hypothalamus. Although the pituitary usually steals all the credit for being the master hormonal gland, in reality it’s the consummate servant to the hypothalamus.

Speaking of hormones, a lot has been written about ghrelin and leptin in recent years, the two appetite hormones that play a supportive role in our feelings of hunger and fullness. I’ll get to the hormonal reactions in the body’s quest for fullness shortly. But first, we must cover the gateway to fullness that’s largely absent from discussions about hunger and appetite. At one end of the fullness spectrum we have the hypothalamus, and at the other—the genesis of fullness—we have another unique region in the body.